alt Hacker News// The need for ongoing friction in long-term skill formation.
The subtitle of the story tells it all.
There are some people who seek out friction. Think about an athlete or a hardcore nerd.
The best engineers are ones who were fascinated with computers and learning as kids and persued it at every opportunity. Found their own friction in other words.
For those kinds of people, friction-seeking is the constant and what LLMs did is moved the point of where the friction occurs.
For example - the best engineers I've worked with didn't necessarily have lots of experience coding in assembly because that kind of friction was no longer necessary. But they could solve hard problems (and if a problem really required assembly they could go learn it)
What I think will be hit much harder by AI is the low tier engineer. Someone who was never truly curious and committed to it, for whom it was just a job. For example a typical offshore ticket pusher kind of person. That kind of person never went out to find friction and that's the kind of thing that's never going to fly again - if I want mediocre or average, the LLMs are sufficient
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I think coding experts who are only experts at writing code will also be hit pretty hard. Every problem given to them is solved by writing code, and only code, their way and only their way. I think people like that are having a very hard time relinquishing control regardless of the quality and correctness of the LLM output. If it didn't come from them, or conform to their conventions and style, then it's wrong. These are the people that seem to be terrific developers but then when asked to be a team lead and bring a group of developers to their level completely fail.
Curiosity is really key, and I find that LLMs diminish curiosity in people that might otherwise have it because the allure of the answer is often a lot stronger than the allure of the friction. I guess that's just the distilling of the industry over time, but that could certainly lead to a shortage of expertise.
I mean if you think about it, that sounds like a miserable existence to begin with. I would not rule out that some people will use this.. uh.. disruption, to start pursuing something that actually brings them joy.
Of course, bills need to be paid and it's not all that simple. But at least there might be such a silver lining.
I think this expresses what I've been trying to form in my mind.
I've been trying to map the LLM advancements and the current state of software development onto prior technological improvements. History is littered with similar cases where the abstraction layer ends up getting lifted, and people struggle with getting accustomed to working at that higher abstraction level.
For the people that fall in love with a single abstraction layer or don't have an interest in learning new paradigms, when their known pattern is abstracted away, they're condemned to being left behind, either unwilling or unable to adapt.
I don't think any industry is free from this, any person in any industry/profession over a period of 20 years or more has likely had to undergo massive adjustments as technology changed their field.
We're not unique, but that doesn't stop it from feeling so jarring when it happens to us